Voting no to say yes to baseball stadium

9-14-03

By EDWARD CONE
News & Record

I try to vote with my head and not my heart, so I’m going to vote against the referendum that would ban new stadiums from downtown Greensboro.

If I followed my emotions, and gave in to the anger and frustration I feel with both sides on this issue, I wouldn’t vote at all.

Remember, “no” on the ballot means “yes” to the stadium, which makes about as much sense as anything else in this circus.

A new stadium at the Bellemeade site will be a net positive for Greensboro. It will bring energy, excitement and substantial private investment to a downtown that is close to the tipping point toward rejuvenation. Bellemeade is not the best possible location, but it’s not bad, and it is the only place the guys writing the check want to play ball.

That’s what I keep reminding myself as I fume at the inept marketing of the project and the lack of leadership that got us to this point in the first place. Then I think about the tainted petition that brought us the referendum and the overly broad restrictions it would place on downtown development, and the no-that-means-yes vote makes sense.

The Baseball Boys say they’ll build their stately pleasure dome no matter what the outcome of the Oct. 7 vote, and they seem to have the law on their side in terms of their vested rights in the project. But legal and right aren’t always the same thing. Building a stadium in the face of a vote against it would not exactly bring closure to this emotional fight.

Defeating the referendum is no sure thing. Just 22 percent of Guilford County residents voted in the 2000 primary. This year’s mayoral race, which could inspire a movie called “Dull and Duller,” won’t drive voter turnout, while anti-stadium candidates for City Council abound, which might. Meanwhile, the petition that put the referendum on the ballot got more than 8,000 signatures. Even if some sizable percentage of those signatures belonged to people who didn’t know what they were signing, the no-stadium side could come into the election with a substantial bloc of guaranteed votes.

In the face of this challenge, the stadium boosters need to run a smart campaign, mobilizing voters and making sure they understand the bizarro-world ballot where no means yes. Instead, they are starting late and coming across with the same arrogance that put them in this entirely avoidable fix to begin with.

Action Greensboro has brought much of its misery upon itself. The concerns of Fisher Park should have been addressed before the Bellemeade project was announced. The foundation heads should have gone to the Aycock neighborhood long ago and found those things in the multi-point area plan that they could support, and pledged to do so.

And it should go without saying, but unfortunately does not, that the mayor of Greensboro should have locked all of the parties in a boardroom and made them play nice, instead of allowing this ridiculous civil war to fester.

Reaching out to people with legitimate questions may not have garnered the stadium crew a lot of votes, but it would have done a lot to build good will. Instead, they ignored the real concerns of everyday citizens and now lump them in with the actual “naysayers” who would oppose Jim Melvin if he had a cure for cancer. I guess there’s a case to be made for a negative campaign when you’re trying to get people to vote against something, but we would be in much better shape as a city if the positives of the project could be emphasized.

Politics is a messy process, and this has been so much messier than it needed to be. Combined with the antics of the petition pushers, it’s almost enough to make me curse both houses. But then I imagine the new stadium, and all the good things it will mean to a city in dire need of good things, and the decision to cast my “no” vote in support of baseball in downtown Greensboro is an easy one.

Ed Cone (www.edcone.com, efcone@mindspring.com) writes a column for the News & Record most Sundays.

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